| How The New York Times made sense of the Sochi Olympics one frame at a time Posted: 09 Apr 2014 11:08 AM PDT Big events — Super Bowls, the Oscars, the Olympics — are when media companies want to make sure their interactive features shine the brightest. The Olympics, in particular, are an interesting case because they last over the course of two weeks rather than one night, which means newsrooms need a continuous coverage plan in place for interactives.  At The New York Times, the graphics team put together an entirely new system and set of workflows to create interactive features, including videos, photo composites, and more to cover the Sochi Winter Olympics.
At Knight Lab, Times graphics editors Wilson Andrews and Larry Buchanan explain how the planning paid off in covering the events live: The group was divided into five three-person teams of visual journalists. Each team was assigned to an event to cover and began with an intense research and pre-reporting process in the weeks before the games. Andrews, whose team focused on figure skating, said that each journalist aimed to be as educated with their designated sport as possible before the event. They contacted sources (usually experts or ex-Olympians) with whom they would speak right before and immediately after the event so that each composite would be accompanied by thorough reporting and analysis right away. During the events themselves, members of the team in Sochi would shoot the event and run the images through a Photoshop script they'd written prior to the games, said Larry Buchanan, a Times graphics editor. The script detected the differences between images and created a composite that was "80 percent" there, Buchanan said. They also built a variety of modules beforehand to create composites, diptychs, or finisher's graphics depending on the sport. One of the reasons the team was able to get the graphics up so quickly is because their system allowed them to work as a singular unit.
Here’s an example of one of those composites — cooler, bigger version here: 
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| “Journalism is aggregation” Posted: 09 Apr 2014 09:30 AM PDT At The Washington Post, Joel Achenbach briefly realizes it’s turtles all the way down: Interviewing is a craft. An interview is not quite the same thing as a conversation. There's an attempt in an interview to extract useful information, and this is a unilateral endeavor. I'm the one asking the questions here. If the source, for some reason, perhaps after an hour of badgering, asks me a question — for example, "When is this story going to run?" — I will answer in a barely audible whisper, "And you are who, exactly?" But now I'm wondering if what I consider "reporting" is just a form of aggregating, of skimming, of lifting the best parts of a scientist's work and repurposing it for my own interests. These scientists have spent many, many years doing research, much of it at the very edge of the knowable, where finding a new piece of solid data is a laborious process that may require long nights at the computer or the laboratory bench, or mulling a bust of Galileo, and this work has to be slotted among other obligations, including grant applications, peer-reviewing papers, teaching, advising graduate students, holding office hours, serving on faculty committees and schmoozing at the faculty club. And here I am calling up and saying: "Give me the fruit of your mental labors." Asking for the ripest fruit, as it were. Asking not just for information but for wisdom. Give it to me! For free. And they did, because they always do, because we have a system of sorts.
You can find a younger, shaggier-haired version of me making this same argument — that gathering and reassembling the intellectual work of others is core to the journalistic program and has been forever — four years ago at Harvard Law School. (Also, see this 2009 piece and the comments.) Unfortunately, Achenbach then backs off this revelation by arguing that (a) he knows some stuff too, damn it, which makes it different (I guess aggregators don’t know anything?) and (b) that learning things by making a digital telephone call somehow exists on a whole other plane of existence from learning things by using a digital research tool. It’s the old Puritan idea of the cleansing power of labor — that when things become easier, they lose their worth. Oh, well.  |